The conflict was thick with forebodings of the second world war. Few had reckoned on such a long, drawn-out saga of futility and wasted human lives. The first world war, in Lebow's view the "defining event of the 20th century", killed and wounded more than 35 million people, both military and civilian, through poison gas, starvation, shell fire and machine-gun. Thus at Sarajevo the Serbian assassin Gavrilo Princip set in motion an "unintended chain of events" that culminated in carnage such as the world had never seen and Princip himself could not have imagined. Throughout, Lebow stresses that minor events can have huge consequences, and huge events do not necessarily have huge causes. For one thing, it deprived the war party in Vienna of the pretext it needed to open hostilities with Serbia, so peace in Europe was maintained. In Lebow's alternative, Franz Ferdinand's survival at Sarajevo forestalled the conflict in unforeseen ways.
Looked at one way, Franz Ferdinand's was the most successful assassination in modern history, as it resulted in a vastly expanded Serb-ruled state that was only finally dismantled in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Two world wars would not be enough to repair the damage done at Sarajevo in 1914, when the equilibrium of Europe was shattered overnight. Russia in 1914 was probably ripe for revolution, but Lebow wants us to reflect on an alternative, when Stalin was absent. Lebow contends that the Bolshevik revolution itself might not have erupted in 1917 without Sarajevo and the conflict that ensued.
By his murderous ideology, Stalin put an end to the region's ethnic diversity of Jews, Muslims and Magyars. Soviet Europe, with its grey, monocultural states cleansed of human variety, would have been unrecognisable to Franz Ferdinand and his walrus-moustached officials. The double-headed eagle was seen to fly over the Habsburg capital of Vienna as a symbol of monarchical tolerance in the real "historical world", of course, the tolerance was crushed by Nazi and Soviet intolerance. The Habsburg empire under Ferdinand would have continued to unite Serbs, Croatians, Greeks, Bulgars and Transylvanians, Jews and non-Jews alike, in the cosmopolitan lands of Mitteleuropa (Middle Europe). In Richard Ned Lebow's alternative history, Franz Ferdinand is crowned emperor in 1916 following the death of his uncle, Franz Josef. Without Hitler, in turn, European Jewry was allowed to prosper and grow numerous Israel may not have come into being, however, as Jewry had no need of a salvation abroad. Without Sarajevo, moreover, German aggression might not have been punished at Versailles, and Hitler would have had no cause for grievance. The first world war may not have broken out as a consequence and the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires would have been left standing. Had Hitler won the war, all Europe might now be a vast German colony living space (Lebensraum) for Hitlerite Germany would be dying space for others.Īrchduke Franz Ferdinand Lives!, a work of counterfactual history, envisages a world in which the assassination of the archduke at Sarajevo in 1914 never happened. Forty years earlier, in 1964, the British film It Happened Here envisaged the wartime occupation of the British Isles by Nazi Germany. The novel tapped into post-9/11 fears of death and dominance by an alien power. Philip Roth, in his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, imagined a pro-Nazi United States after aviation hero and antisemite Charles Lindbergh had won the 1940 presidential election. T he "what-if" historical genre rewrites the past as fantasy.
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